William Weir: February 2010 Archives

It's a Day of Silence here at It's Alive! For all we write here about about the science of sound, I thought it appropriate to celebrate its underrated (and underused) counterpart.

Of all tools at the hands of the musician - pitch, rhythm, timbre, etc. - silence may be the one that gets the least attention. But it's the space between the notes that can make all the difference.

"It's not the notes that you play, it's the notes that you don't play," Miles Davis said.

Davis was way ahead of neuroscience when he said that, but science caught up a few years ago. In 2007, researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine studied the brain images of subjects who listened to a symphony by 18th-century composer William Boyce. What they found was that peak activity in the brain occurred during the time between movements, and the activity during these silences was more consistent among the subject than it was at other times. One theory is that it's the brain trying to organize information that it just experienced and is now anticipating. Their work was published in Neuron.

Another study on pauses in music about the same time came out of the University of California, San Diego. Researcher Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis found that subjects heard not just silence, but rhythms in the pauses of the musical pieces they listened to. How they perceived the silences depended not so much on duration, but on the sounds that the preceded and followed the pauses. From the studySilences in Music are Musical, Not Silent: An Exploratory Study of the Effect of Context on Musical Pauses (published in Music Perception):

The same acoustic silence, embedded in two different excerpts, can be perceived dramatically differently. Impressions of the music that preceded the silence seep into the gap, as do expectations of what may follow.

On a less science-y note, Jan Swafford had a great essay last year in Slate on the powerful effect of the pause in classical music. Composers from Haydn (whose Opus 33 uses the pause for humor; see clip above) to Beethoven to Ives have used the pause to great effect, and for a wide range of emotional expressiveness. Swafford writes:

... [A] nothing can be just as expressive as a something. It depends on the frame, what it is that echoes in the silence.

It's a Day of Silence here at It's Alive! For all we write here about about the science of sound, I thought it appropriate to celebrate its underrated (and underused) counterpart.

Here's another book that explores silence and its effects:

Listening Below the Noise: The Transformative Power of Silence by Anne D. LeClaire

Cape Cod writer Anne D. LeClaire decided 16 years ago to spend a day without talking. She liked it so much that she now spends two days every month silent. Her book, published last year, describes how the practice has changed her and her relationships. Writes Carole Goldberg in the Sun-Sentinel:

"At first, her husband, Hillary, a fisherman and outdoorsman, was puzzled and annoyed by her determination to pursue 24-hour periods of silence. Her college-age children and friends were confused and sometimes angry at what they saw as withdrawal. But in time, they came to understand."

It's a Day of Silence here at It's Alive! For all we write here about about the science of sound, I thought it appropriate to celebrate its underrated (and underused) counterpart.

The hum of my refrigerator used to wake me all the time. But it wasn't the hum itself, but it's abrupt stop that would cause me to wake (it took a while to realize what was going on; now the door gets shut). Or you know how you fall asleep in front of the TV and wake up only when someone shuts it off?

Much has been explored about sound's effect on the brain, but some researchers in Oregon are looking at neuronal activity triggered by silence.

While we characterize silence as the absence of sound, the brain hears it as loud and clear as any other noise.

In fact, according to a recent study from the University of Oregon, some areas of the brain respond solely to sound termination. Rather than sound stimuli traveling through the same brain pathways from start to finish as previously thought, neuron activity in rats has shown that onset and offset of sounds take separate routes.

It's a Day of Silence here at It's Alive! For all we write here about about the science of sound, I thought it appropriate to celebrate its underrated (and underused) counterpart.

This is the inside of an anechoic chamber, so called because there's absolutely no echo inside.

This one is inside Haskins Laboratory in New Haven, where they study the science of speech, and which I visited the other day.

I've never been so appreciative of echo until I spent a minute inside this chamber. It's spooky. When you talk, it feels like the words are dying in front of your face.

At Haskins, researchers bring a dummy head into the chamber and study how air flows through the head when certain sounds are spoken (specifically, I think they're studying the effect of fricatives - "f," "v," "s," and "h," among them).

It's a Day of Silence here at It's Alive! For all we write here about about the science of sound, I thought it appropriate to celebrate its underrated (and underused) counterpart.

As the Winter Olympics winds to a close, consider the Games' great sounds: the shushing of skis against snow, the click-clack of skates on ice, the echoing whoosh of a bobsled. But they're hard to hear against all that yakking of the commentators.

"In a perfect world perhaps, the events would be allowed to unfold in silence, the commentary coming later with the replay when it isn't a distraction. (This will also keep the commentators from looking like idiots when they are so busy praising a skier's ability it takes them five seconds to realize that he or she just fell.)"

You have to hunt around on NBC's olympic website, but you can find some good videos of events sans the commentary. McNamara singles out in particular "Lindsey Vonn Unplugged," a clip of her gold medal downhill run, featuring just the sound of skis and the crowd.

And in fairness to the commentators, I'll point out that I have learned a lot about some of the sports. Once I understood the rules and strategies of the biathalon (cross-country skiing and target shooting), not only did I stop making fun of it, it became my favorite of the winter games.

Also, for as much as we might complain about commentators, we tend to prefer having them around. The one NFL game televised without announcers, on Dec. 20, 1980, was a ratings success, but NBC execs decided the increased viewership was the fluke of curiosity seekers. Most people watching said the announcer-less game was more off-putting than exciting.

It's a Day of Silence here at It's Alive! For all we write here about about the science of sound, I thought it appropriate to celebrate its underrated (and underused) counterpart.

Here's the first chapter of One Square Inch of Silence (published in the Wall Street Journal), a book by Gordon Hempton, a former Seattle bicycle messenger who created for himself the singular job description of sound tracker and acoustical ecologist. Journalist John Grossmann is his co-author.

The book makes the case that silence is an increasingly rare commodity and we should work to preserve it the way we do other dwindling resources. Along the way, they record the noise levels of various cities, discuss the health effects of noise and their quest to keep the sounds of nature undisturbed by man-made noise in Olympic Park in his home state of Washington.

It's a Day of Silence here at It's Alive! For all we write here about about sound, music and the science of each, I thought it appropriate to celebrate its underrated (and underused) counterpart.

We start the day with John Cage's famous 4'33'' performed by Armin Fuchs (I noticed: Fuchs appears to begin performing about 15 seconds into the clip - the point where preparation and actual performance begin is understandably a little fuzzy - and ends about 5:20, so it appears that he's playing it adagio - or he just doesn't have a watch).

The piece was first performed in Woodstock, NY by pianist David Tudor in 1952. Though no musical notes are played, 4'33" isn't so much about silence as it is about the sounds that we normally tune out - the coughing of audience members, the shuffling of feet, the rain outside.

Cage's masterpiece of avant-garde music the subject of a new book by critic and composer Kyle Gann, No Such Thing as Silence(to be published next month). Gann writes in the introduction:

After four minutes and 33 seconds had passed, Tudor rose to receive apppluse - and thus was premiered one of the most controversial, inspiring, surprising, infamous, perplexing, and influential musical works since Igor Stravinsky's Le sacre du printemps.

As Apple, Amazon, Sony and Google scramble to take the lead in the e-book race, and publishers do what they can to make the new technology work for them, it turns out that the Bible is emerging as the Good e-Book. According to Chris Faraone in the Boston Phoenix, the Bible has been at the forefront of the still new technology.

For instance, he writes, "six of the top 20 most popular paid e-books in the Apple App Store are Bibles."

Terry Quinn in the Journal of Music laments (via Utne Reader) that people don't sing as much as they used to:

"Perhaps singing has been taken for granted. It doesn't require money, and, unlike instrumental ability, which we generally consider can be learned through practice, we often presume that you either have a voice or you don't."

For all the talk of tone-deafness, Quinn correctly points out that very few people are truly tone deaf. According to a study in the Journal of Neuroscience, about 10 percent of the population is tone deaf. Another figure I've seen puts the figure at 5 percent. Most of the time, the difference between a good sense of pitch and a bad one is practice.

More from the Guardian: this one's about a physics professor at Emory University campaigning to rid Hollywood movies of bad science. Or at least most bad science. he says sci-fi movies should be allowed one major science transgression. But not more than one.

"You can have things move faster than the speed of light, if you want," he says. "But after that, I would like things developed in a coherent way."

He's a member of the Science and Entertainment Exchange, which has a rather disparate group of folks, from Dustin Hoffman to Steven Pinker (Hey! He was in my last post!) to Craig Venter to Oliver Sacks. It's a program of the National Academy of Sciences with a mission to "help bring the reality of cutting-edge science to creative and engaging storylines," according to its website.

It's been some 13 years since Steven Pinker declared in his book How the Mind Works that music was "auditory cheesecake" - a pleasureable, but evolutionarily unnecessary part of life. I don't know if he still feels that way, or if he regrets writing that. In any case, the phrase has gotten a lot of mileage, usually from folks who heartily disagree with it.

In his review of Philip Ball's book, The Music Instinct, Guy Dammann brings up Pinker's assessment. Those who disagree, he writes in the Guardian, tend to fall into two groups - evolutionary scientists who believe that music plays a role in sexual selection and those in the humanities who say Pinker arrived at his verdict simple because there wasn't a more obvious answer at the ready.

Ball's book doesn't fall into any of these camps, Dammann writes, but gives a thoughtful look at the nature of music:

In contemplating the mysteries of music we are also thereby contemplating the mystery of ourselves. Because of this, easy answers tend to be irrelevant. Ball, thankfully, doesn't try to provide any, but rather sends the reader back to the music a better listener.

Should the actors behind computer-generated characters get the same respect as traditional flesh-and-blood roles?

That question comes up, thanks to "Avatar." Despite getting nine Oscar nominations, none of them are in the acting categories.

And as "performance capture" technology becomes ever more sophisticated, the line between acting and animation will get even more blurred. Rachel Abramovitz has a good story about it in the Los Angeles Times.

The Nunavut Language Summit was held this month in Iquluit, the capital of Canada's northernmost territory, Nanavut. Part of the discussion focused on whether pop music could be the key to preserving Inuktitut, the Inuit language most associated with the territory.

I've seen different things on the state of Inuktitut, but John McWhorter, who seems a trusty source, insists that it's not dying in this 2006 essay. (A few months ago, McWhorter had an interesting essay in World Affairs making the case that even when a language dies, it doesn't mean the death of that culture.)

However, the Facebook page"Make Inuktitut an Official Language in Canada" argues that the language "has very little recognition, and without recognition federally, it will become another one of Canada's lost or dying languages, like other native and even non-native languages."

So I notice that a lot of the snowboarders are wired up to iPods. Kelly Clark of the American team goes so far as to belt out a tune to whatever she's listening to before barreling down the halfpipe. It's probably a good idea - blocks out a noisy environment among other things. And there's been plenty of research on the effects of music on physical activity.

For instance:

- The U.S. Sports Academy found that people listening to techno music ran 5 to 9 percent faster than when they weren't listening to music.

- An Ohio State University study found that listening to music while exercising even increased verbal skills afterward.

So what's the best music to pump you up? Researchers say it's music in which the beats per minute mirror your own heartbeat. Olympic athletes routinely get their heart rates over 200 (biathletes have the particularly tricky endeavor of quickly reducing their heart rates to about 140 when transitioning from skiing to shooting). Anything this fast is considered "prestissimo." For instance, the White Stripes' "Rag and Bone" (224 BPM, according to my iTunes) and Slayer's "Necrophobic" (248 BPM) qualify.

The always fascinating Tod Machover, godfather of hyperinstruments, expounds in a five-part video interview on The Big Think about music: The origins of the Rock Band video game; the watershed moment when the Beatles and Glenn Gould both decided in the same year to concentrate exclusively on recording music; the importance feeling "merged, married" to a musical instrument among other things.

Particularly interesting are his thoughts about the iPhone's potential as a musical instrument. He compares it to a talking dog; that it talks at all is impressive. As remarkable as certain apps like the Ocarina are, Machover still says the iPhone falls short of being of real value to a performing musician:

It doesn't feel like an instrument; it's hard, it's fragile, you can't squeeze it, you can't touch it. It's fine for most of the things you do with multimedia, but think of a piano - I mean, a piano is a machine, but you've got ivory, you've weight behind the keys, you have the feel, the resonance in the instrument."

I saw this on Binary Heap. It's a 1960 episode of the game show "I've Got a Secret."

Although he had done 4'33'' eight years earlier, it seems clear that the host and audience are unfamiliar with Cage and his work. The host (I think it's Garry Moore) even pulls out a New York Tribune review to prove that Cage was legit.

He then warns Cage that the audience might laugh at his performance, which included radios, a grand piano, a water pitcher, a blender, a seltzer bottle and a bath tub.

CAGE: "I consider laughter preferable to tears."

Also interesting: The radios were not working because hours before the show, there was an unresolved union dispute over who had jurisdiction over plugging the radios.

This is pretty cool. It's the Vegetable Orchestra, which (as name implies) plays instruments made from vegetables. The YouTube comments have been disabled, but apparently there were people writing in to criticize the use of vegetables for music when there's so much starvation in the world. The Vegetable Orchestra point out, rather reasonably, that not building vegetable instruments really isn't going to help anyone.

Conventional wisom is that writing didn't happen until some 5,000 years ago. But 26 symbols keep showing up in Stone Age sites, leading some to think that writing happed thousands of years ealier. New Scientist has the story.

This is Marv, the robotic vibraphone (or, to be precise, "a MIDI Actuated Robotic Vibraphone"), created by Tim O'Keefe, Michael McIntyre, and Brock Roland at the San Francsico State University. As they write on Marv's website:

Marv can play music of high complexity, far more complex than a human player could ever achieve, as Marv is capable of striking any and all keys simultaneously, as well as damping each key individually. Marv can play much faster than a human vibraphonist, repeating single notes as quickly as 25ms apart.

Over the years, writes the Washington Post's classical writer Anne Midgette, figure skating music has gone from tacky to boring, Skaters used to set their routines to medley's that randomly clashed one classical piece with another were merely tacky.

But today, better editing technology means that skaters can take a single piece and nimbly snip, splice, speed up and slow down music to suit their purposes. Unfortunately, Midgette writes, their choices aren't very exciting.

She writes:

Skaters tend to cling to what has done well before: "Carmen" in variouspermutations tops a list that includes a heavy dose of Russian Ballet and dance music ("Swan Lake," "Scheherazade") and Spanish-themed works.

Part of that is because of new rules that favor the less risky choices and blander fare. Popular movie soundtracks are also popular.

I remember a long time ago seeing a routine set to Pink Floyd's "One of These Days." As I recall, they edited out the one lyric in the middle of the song: "One of these days, I'm going to cut you into little pieces." Even so, that's a pretty risky choice.

We go from a jaw harp made out of a phone card (see earlier post), to something a little more technologically advanced. It's the Eigenharp, and I want one (once I get my hands on an extra $5,000 or so).

I interviewed John Lambert, inventor of the Eigenharp yesterday. It took nine years to develop (four years just to hear the first tones) and north of $10 million to develop.

I'll have a lot more about our talk next week; for now, here's the most popular clip of the Eigenharp in action.

Two interesting stories this week about efforts to keep old video games from falling off into cultural irrelevance. As formats change, old games are left to decay and collect dust. As Clay Risen writes in the Atlantic, even finding a way to play the old games is tricky as patents and other legalities get in the way of universal access. But it might be worth the effort. The novel, when it was still new, was considered hardly worthy of much reverence. Maybe, in 200 years, Risen writes, "Super Mario Bros. could be treated with as much respect as the Brothers Karamazov."

And Gamasutra today has a story by Jenn Frank and Leigh Alexander on the National Center for the History of Electronic Games in Rochester, NY and its ongoing attempts to preserve video games (and electronic games in general). I know nothing about the NCHEG, but it sounds interesting. According to its website, the center's museum has a collection of some 20,000 items.

Long before Bowie, Sun Ra and Funkadelic, aliens and space travel have been showing up in popular music. NPR has a good story about Butler University Sally Childs-Helton and her studies of space music's origin. Turns out tunes from Tin Pan Alley and folk songs in the Appalachian Mountains mused about what was out there.

Researchers at Dartmouth are looking at the science of funny. New Scientist has a story on the findings, among which is that extroverts get a better laugh out of jokes than introverts. Also, men and women process humor differently:

[W]omen take significantly longer than men to decide whether they find something funny, though that doesn't seem to spoil their enjoyment of the joke. Indeed, women show a greater response in the limbic system than men, suggesting they feel a greater sense of reward.

Following yesterday's post on my inauspicious debut as a molecular gastronomist, here's something from today's Wall Street Journal on the state of the curious science/cuisine movement. Reporter Javier Espinoza talks with Ferran Adria (pictured), who pretty much invented molecular gastronomy. He seems to be in a transition period. Adria is shutting down his restaurant, even though it does gangbuster business, and is intent on reinventing his style of cooking.

Curiously, the leaders of the movement want to distance themselves from the term "molecular gastronomy." The article notes that Adria and his fellow chefs known for their scientific approach - Grant Achatz and Heston Blumenthal - bristle at the term.

When I ate at WD-50 in New York - the restaurant in the U.S. best-known for its molecular gastronomy cuisine - the waiter told me that Wylie Dufresne, the restaurant's owner and chef, didn't much care for the term either. I had fried quail with banana tartar, trout with root beer-date sauce and an ice cream dish made with beer and crushed potato chips. Against all odds, it was fantastic.

So what happens when you get a Beetle expert, a former pool hustler and an avant-garde composer, and pit them against a plague of tree-destroying beetles?

Jim Giles has a great article in the Atlantic on an elaborate attempt to disrupt a particularly menacing colony of beetles. The music of Guns 'n' Roses is deployed. So is the voice of Rush Limbaugh. Neither worked. Then they recorded the beetles' own sound and turned it against the insects - this time getting better results. It's a good read.

To the left is my first attempt at edible origami. It's supposed to be a crane; I made it out of a sheet of wonton dough. It's from a recipe in The Hungry Scientist, a cook book "for techies, tinkerers and foodies."

I had an article about it in today's Courant. Understandably, the photo department chose to go with the picture of wonton cranes from the book rather than my own creations.

This is what the cranes are supposed to look like:

I suppose it helps if you actually know how to make origami to begin with, before you go trying it on wonton dough. I eventually resorted to making paper airplanes out it, which actually turned out OK (see below).

Anyway, the book is an attempt to bring molecular gastronomy into the home kitchen. It's a culinary movement that began in Europe in the 1990s and takes a scientific approach to cooking, experimenting with different ways of processing food and how various flavors interact. So you get things like lobster meat that's been turned into a foam, or whiskey-flavored ice cream. Ingredients with names like methylcellulose and xanthan gum come into play. Blow torches and lasers are occasionally used.

Speaking of xanthan gum and molecular gastronomy, More Intelligent Life had a good essay on it by Molly Young. This mysterious ingredient with the "fake-sounding superhero name" seems to appear on ingredients lists of packaged foods everywhere.

But who cooks with it, and what does it do? Created in 1968 in a laboratory, it's a pale yellow powder used as a thickener in sauces and other foods. Young's own attempts to cook at home with it turned out about as good as my edible origami, but she's convinced that it's part of the future of home cooking. She muses:

Perhaps at the root of our interest in foreign powders and gums lies something deeper than boredom or misplaced ambitions, something closer to the Englightenment belief that scientific progress can solve all of our problems.

An interesting thought, but as she points out, who said chocolate chip cookies needed solving anyway?

It's the beginning of the work week, but here at It's Alive, it sadly marks the end of Mellotron Week. We finish out with a post about Mellodrama, a new documentary about the Mellotron (now on DVD).

The film, directed by Dianna Dilworth, goes into the history of the instrument, which was invented by Harry Chamberlin in the 1950s. The California resident, envisioned it as a way for families to enjoy live music in their own home. But the Mellotron (or Chamberlin - more on that later) didn't work out that way. Famous users include the Beatles (most famously on "Strawberry Fields Forever"), the Moody Blues and Black Sabbath. Even L. Ron Hubbard owned one

It's essentially the earliest sampler, using tape with recordings of instruments and voices (they're not tape loops - that would be the very rare Birotron - but 8-second long strips of tape that have to rewind every time the note is played. The tapes are triggered each time a key is pressed.

Dilworth previously directed We Are the Children, a documentary about Michael Jackson fans, and Planting Seeds, about a landscaping project at the Bayview Operahouse. She says she discovered the Mellotron sometime in the mid-1990s.

"It really amazes me that this kind of technology was a kind of forerunner to modern-day sampling," she says. "It was such an interesting, archaic machine."

The instrument wasn't known as the Mellotron until one of Chamberlin's employees, Bill Fransen took the instrument to England and went into business with some developers over there (glossing over the fact that it wasn't his invention). The result was an improved version of the Chamberlin. When Chamberlin himself learned of these "Mellotrons," a deal was worked out and the two versions co-existed.